There's another side to this as well: it distracts from your message and makes you sound weird and creepy.
Don't introduce people as sexy unless you're trying to make a joke about being weird and creepy. In which case, make it a guy, and compliment the way their hair smells for extra weird and creepy.
Michael Scott: I want you, to meet my family. Come on. Oscar Martinez, accountant extraordinare, this is Justin. This is Darryl Philbin. Isn't he big? And you already met her, Pam Beesly, office hottie.
Being reminded of an episode from The Office is probably evidence that you're doing it wrong.
I agree with that. Even if you didn't care about sexism (which you should), it's just not a good introduction. If your event has one of the few prominent women in technology keynoting it, that fact will be obvious to everyone, and there's no real need to emphasize it, especially not in a way that could come off as weird. A bit more classy to just emphasize why she's actually there, how she's relevant to the event, etc.
For whatever reason, I have usually seen this done better with Black technologists. Unfortunately, even rarer than women as keynote speakers, but introductions rarely do anything too facepalm-inducing. Maybe people just have more cultural sensitivity around race, so some of the more egregious things you could do in that context are too obviously stupid for anyone to actually do.
> In which case, make it a guy, and compliment the way their hair smells for extra weird and creepy.
In trying to be aware of gender issues, it seems you've (accidentally) stumbled into homophobia or mysandry. You're implying that sexualizing a man is "extra weird and creepy", something which many people would disagree with.
Simple rule: don't sexualize people in a professional setting, unless you are trying to market their sexuality.
The implication is still there that making it a guy is okay because sexualizing males is somehow materially different / more acceptable than sexualizing females. Perhaps it is with respect to the minority population of women in tech, but it is not more acceptable when we consider the implicit judgement of homoeroticism that makes this sexualization less damaging than the sexualization of a female.
I took the GP to mean "make it a guy, because singling out a women because of her sex in a mostly male environment is not cool". I may be wrong, but principle of charity and all that.
I'm definitely not trying to defend homophobia, totally agree with you on that.
Don't introduce people as sexy unless you're trying to make a joke about being weird and creepy. In which case, make it a guy, and compliment the way their hair smells for extra weird and creepy.